Thrasher Magazine

Thrasher wasn't built to be a magazine first. It was built to sell trucks. Fausto Vitello and Eric Swenson had co-founded Independent Truck Company in 1978, and by 1981 they needed a way to promote it. Their solution was to start a skateboarding magazine and put their own product in front of the exact audience they wanted, with Kevin Thatcher brought on as the founding editor. The magazine's early newspaper-style format wasn't a design choice either. Fausto had a friend with a press set up for that paper size, so that's the size Thrasher launched in.

The motto, Skate and Destroy, wasn't invented by the magazine. It was already in use among skaters and punks in the 1970s, and Thrasher just adopted it as its own, which tells you a lot about the magazine's whole approach: document the culture that already exists instead of manufacturing one.

A detail almost nobody clocks: the Thrasher logo font is Banco, a display typeface designed by French type designer Roger Excoffon back in 1951, three decades before skateboarding ever used it. Both founders had rough ends, Swenson by suicide in 2011 after years of chronic pain from a motorcycle accident, Vitello from a heart attack while riding in the 2000s, but the magazine they built to sell trucks outlived both of them by a wide margin and is still the most recognized name in skate media.

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